Human activities are changing the water chemistry of many streams and rivers in the Eastern U.S., with consequences for water supplies and aquatic life, so reports a new study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Managing fish in human-altered rivers is a challenge because their food webs are sensitive to environmental disturbance. So reports a new study in the journal Ecological Monographs, based on an exhaustive three-year analysis of the Colorado River in Glen and Grand Canyons.

Michael Meaden is a hands-on, outdoor teen. As a youngster, he enjoyed outdoor youth camps at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook. But then the 14-year-old outgrew the camps. Fortunately, last year a new teen program was added to the youth camps: Eco-Investigator, for rising eighth- through 10th-graders.

Join the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies for the 26th Annual Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Symposium, where eleven students will present the results of their summer research projects.

Dr. Gene E. Likens, the Founding President of Millbrook's Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, recently celebrated 50 years of research at The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES) in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

In the Northeast, the black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) that spread Lyme disease also infect people with other maladies, among them anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and – as a new paper in the journal Parasites and Vectors reports – Powassan encephalitis.

The New Yorker reports on the controversy surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Columnist Michael Specter interviewed Cary disease ecologist Richard Ostfeld about the ecology of ticks and the spread of the disease.

In the Housatonic River, zebra mussels -- non-native bivalves that can move into a water body and just dominate it -- were found in 2009 in Massachusetts and in 2010 in Connecticut at Lake Lillinonah and Lake Zoar.